5 life-changing tips for real estate sales people

Is poor time management impacting your productivity and mental health? Join the club! It’s all too common for real estate salespeople to start their careers with enthusiasm and excitement, only to sabotage their goals… or worse, burn out or ruin their relationships - due to poor time management habits.

In this article, we explore how to get ahead in real estate, without risking your health or happiness.

5 Tips for Taking Control of your Time and Success

1. Observe how you naturally organise your time and action

Are you strategic with your time? Do you focus on the strategies and tactics you need to achieve and maintain your goals in all areas of your life? Or are you racing through your days attending to the urgent, noisy tasks and ‘firefighting’ issues?

If it’s the latter, here’s a couple of things to consider:

• The important stuff is usually much quieter in our heads than the urgent. If you don’t prioritise it, you risk the ‘noise of the urgent’ overtaking your life

• Our mental and physical health and our careers are too important to leave to chance. Both are impacted by poor planning

• You are ‘x’ number of years from retirement. The future may feel a long way off, but have you thought about how much money you’ll need to be able to retire and live comfortably? Are you on track with building adequate financial assets to generate the kind of lifestyle you’ll need to live a long, happy retirement? If not, get clear… don’t leave your future security and lifestyle to chance!

If you naturally organise your time in a way that is ‘ad hoc’ (i.e., you’re disorganised with it), you need to rethink this! Thinking about it might feel hard or boring, but it’s so important. (If you struggle to do it on your own, get help to think it through. Seriously.)

2. Get clear on your goals

This is such a critical one, and yet it’s one that so few people do well. Most people tend to rush around their lives – taking a tonne of action – and with a general hope for ‘progress’. But if you don’t have clear aims that are grounded in what really matters to you, you risk not achieving your goals, or adequately tending to your important relationships, your health - and any other important areas of life.

3. Make sure your goals are clearly thought through

Know what you want - and why you want it. For example, don’t set goals like “to earn $300,000 a year,” if you don’t know what the $300,000 is actually for. It’s too arbitrary. Work out what you actually want (e.g., pay off mortgage, put Mum in that comfortable rest home down the road, paying for Dad’s upcoming cancer treatment, pay for kids’ private schools for the next five years, etc) – and then work out how much money you need to cover those things.

You might discover you only need $200,000 – or, conversely, that you need $500,000. At that point you can re-evaluate your time and strategies for getting there.

4. Prioritise your personal “big rocks”

If you haven’t heard it before, the term ‘big rocks’ refers to a well-known tale of a professor teaching his students about priorities and their use of time. He uses a jar as a representation of one’s capacity, and goes about filling it with big stones first, then smaller stones, then pebbles and finally sand until it’s full. He shares that if you don’t know what your ‘big rocks’ are, and prioritise them, you risk filling your life with smaller (less critical) ones first, ultimately sacrificing the biggest, most important ones.

We see this in real estate time and time again. Relationships with partners, children and friends and health going, unintentionally, by the way-side due to prioritising the urgent over the important.

So don’t do that. Your health and relationships must come first. If these become compromised, it’ll affect your work. Work can work around them. I promise.

Plan out your annual and monthly calendar by first putting in your maintenance ‘big rocks’:

• Dedicated time for your physical health

• Dedicated time for your partner, kids and friends and family

• Dedicated downtime for yourself.

5. Next put in your “business big rocks”

Quality of life is important, but in real estate, so too is business development activity! You already know this!

Make sure you allocate adequate, dedicated time for the following “business big rocks”

• Goal setting

• Running your metrics • Strategic planning

• Development planning: Including CPD hours

• Progress updates, managing your metrics

• Weekly planning and scheduling

• Planning your personal marketing collateral

• Creating your personal marketing collateral

• Contacting your database

• Updating your database

• Regular scheduled networking appointments

• Upcoming networking opportunities

• Blocked time for listing presentations

• Following up buyers after open homes

• Upskilling/fluency practice

Some of these should be repeat, standard diary appointments. Others will likely vary. Some will be annual or six-monthly. Some quarterly or monthly. Others weekly, or even daily. The key is to just start however you think best - and reorganise your allocation of time as you need to, to make sure you’re on track with your goals.

Yes, you also need to attend to timesensitive activities. If you need to, you can move diarised appointments with yourself.

But if you don’t scaffold your time with your big rocks first, you risk them being ignored completely – potentially for months on end (especially if you don’t like doing them or don’t know how!)

Your time is a precious and limited resource. At the risk of repeating myself, if you’re not strategic and well-considered with it, you risk bypassing your health, relationships, happiness and/or your business growth altogether. And if you do that, there will be impacts! It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s a question of ‘when’ and ‘how bad will they be?’

What can you do today to get started in taking control of your time and success? Clarity and preparation is a million times better than regret.

If you’re a manager, and you’re wanting to do a better job of helping your salespeople to hit their goals, but don’t know how to do that, get in touch to find out about how we help managers to do just that. If you’re a salesperson and you need a hand creating a more strategic, planned approach and accountability to help you to achieve your goals, get in touch for a free strategy session to see if and how we can help you.

Jasmine Platt, Founder, Real Estate Leaders

Jasmine Platt is the Founder of Real Estate Leaders. As a high-performance specialist, she works with head agencies, branch leaders, franchise owners and salespeople to help them lift their results, make more money and win more of their time (and sanity) back in the process. To speak with her about how she can help you, email her directly at jasmine@realestateleaders.co.nz